Placed Signs Up Six More Partners To Bring Programmatic In-Store

Vying to become the standard measurement for offline retail attribution depends on working with both buyers’ and sellers’ preferred platforms.

By David KaplanApr 21, 2015 10:01AM

Placed’s David Shim

Placed’s in-store attribution system is now being used by three additional demand-side platforms and three other analytics providers as the company reaches for industry recognition ad the “standard measurement” for determining whether a geo-targeted ad led to offline retail foot traffic.

“Placed Attribution is now available on publisher networks and programmatic buying platforms,” said David Shim, Placed’s CEO/founder. “That’s scale —it is no longer only available to one or two partners; it can now be spread across a buyer’s entire media plan. When you’re talking about understanding a geo-targeted ad’s attribution, it comes down to having a solution that works on as many different channels, mediums, and platforms as possible.”

The spate of partnerships comes amid industrywide collaborations as more brands and retailers see the possibilities of closing the loop around online-to-offline marketing with location-based ad metrics at the center. After all, advertisers want to see clear proof that their spending has a direct correlation to consumer purchases in-store.

Given that location ad space is becoming increasingly crowded, it’s increasingly difficult for marketers and outside observers on all sides of the ad sales divide, to determine how one measurement provider is different from another.

This is why Placed has been working hard to establish close relationships with the publisher networks that have both access to first-party location data and to millions of geo-targeted impressions on one end. At the same time, the company has sought similar attachments to media buyers who control the spending decisions and negotiations with sellers.

Proof of Accuracy — And Transparency

Placed’s metrics are based on a panel model that includes “more than 500,000 active opted-in users, representing 1 in 500 adults in the US. In the grand scheme of online advertising, a panel-based system where consumers download an app and agree to share their location at a retailer, doesn’t sound like a great deal of scale compared to the average desktop solution which can access real-time data by the millions.

However, Placed’s agencies and partners have told GeoMarketing, that the company’s transparency and ability to accurately match exactly what it promises has given the company significant credibility when using geo-targeting.

Specifically, the Placed Attribution model shows whether or not an anonymous segment of consumers who saw an ad went into a store to make a purchase. It is complemented with Placed Targeting, which aims the ads at consumers based on their location activity, a company can be regarded as a neutral and trusted analytics system for all.

“In terms of the accuracy that’s generally available for location-based advertising, on average, a platform can see about 80 lat/long per store visit,” Shim said, referring to the lines on a map that show a given target. “If you only get data from the exchanges, typically, it’s limited to one place where a person opens an app that has location permissions.”

In the limited situation which Shim describes, the consumer’s location signal begins and ends in just one place. The same data from a device doesn’t continue to flow when the person takes it to a Walmart and then to a Starbucks. With Placed, the promise to marketers is that its metrics are constantly monitoring that flow of data to understand location patterns and behaviors in sync, as opposed to seeing a set of locations separately.

“Those are all the data points that we collect, so I think from an accuracy standpoint, it’s a big win for both buyers and sellers who want that comprehensive look at how audiences built on location data are put together in an actionable way,” Shim said, noting that the company now has roughly 60 partners representing programmatic, cross-platform buyers and sellers. “By working with Placed, these partners are enabling marketers to measure and optimize against store visitation, which represents over 90 percent of all retail transactions. The ability to measure beyond the device will only accelerate the growth in programmatic across advertisers.”